Thursday, December 18, 2014

Do you miss your old Polaroid camera? The thrill of waiting for the wet picture to come out, watching it develop as you flapped it up and down only to find out it was a horribly overexposed shot of your foot?

Me, neither.

I also don't want anyone taking my picture in the bathroom.

BUT if for some reason you're nostalgic for the first, and find the second appealing, here's a perfect idea: The Polaroll!

This cleverly designed toilet paper dispenser provides the best of both worlds. The paper rolls out where the snapshots used to, and you can imagine your life is actually interesting enough for someone to want to spy on you in the bathroom.

Unlike the original Polaroid films, I DO NOT recommend shaking the TP around after use.

I live at busy street corner, or as busy as this quiet town can be --it's a college town for a major university, Big 10, but quiet. It's on the snow removal route as post office, fire dept. police dept. local grocer, pharmacy, Catholic church, etc. are on the same street.

Occasionally there's an auto collision when some high school kid in a hurry to get to class after lunch runs into some car at the corner whose clear vision is blocked by the old oak tree of the elderly woman on the opposite corner.

It's usually a fender-bender because of Presbyterian church spill-over, and the Temple crowd parked on the street, when someone doesn't see someone else in their all-confounded hurry.

One time someone ran through the open door of our garage through the back door and asked to use the phone--guess how long ago this occurred--to call an ambulance or a police or someone. It was lucky day that I was fully-clothed and sitting at the kitchen table. (In case you're wondering--we did have a dog at the time, who was very alert to this sort of infringements of her territorial rights.)

Another time, someone ran into our house wanting to know where we kept our Jag because the doctor that used to live here died and the car dealer that kept up with the vehicle's maintenance had been instructed to transport it to the funeral home for the procession.

There are the rare occasions when someone resurfaces the front walk, or replaces the roof, or some other project in our house and in the course of the job has to use the toilet.

But, I just cannot imagine the situation when someone pops in off the street to use our restroom, and then cannot find the toilet paper dispenser because it looks like a Polaroid camera.

Speaking of not-so-public and public restrooms, when my son and I visited Moscow, Russia a few years ago, we realized there doesn't seem to be any free public restrooms.

At a train station, we waited in (separate and far-apart) lines to use the facility, and when I finally got in the door, there was an anteroom where an elderly woman sat a table with a little metal tray for people to place their rubles to enter the room with the toilets. Although each stall had a door, there was no toilet paper, nor soap. Forget about drying hands, and don't even think about public hand-sanitizer, 99% alcohol, and all. Maybe we frequented the cheaper sites, but this accommodation did seem to be lacking in town.

There was a turnstile entrance to a toilet at the Hungarian border, too, that someone had to use their jump-the-stile athleticism, as well.

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

Singing Foo!

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